Solved Xeon E5420 vs Core2Duo e6750

I currently have a custom PC based on a E6750 Core2Duo (4M cache, normally running @ 2.66GHz, overclocked @ 3GHz), on a P35 mobo, with 4 * 1GB sticks of 1333 RAM.

A friend of mine offered to give me his old PC, which is a Dell Precision T5400, which is based on an Intel Xeon E5420 (4 cores, 12M of cache, running @ 2.5GHz), again with 4 * 1GB sticks of 1333 RAM.

Ok, sure, the Xeon is better, but the question is:Assuming the hard disks, sound card, graphics card (and everything else, for that matter) are the same, will the difference actually be noticeable? I am talking real world terms here guys, not benchmarks. Will Windows be noticeably faster? Is gaming performance affected?

From what I understand, the only real difference will be with tasks such as video encoding or engineering simulations. Or perhaps with VM-Ware. Am I wrong? Is it even worth bothering?

I think you have made a fair assessment. The Xeon is a workhorse chip, but overall I don't think you would notice a huge difference. If he is your friend see if he'll let you try it out and see if you notice a big improvement...or not. 4 cores is nice but as you say that tends to be a bigger impact on programs that demand high resource usage.

What Kuwese is saying about the gaming though is correct...I'd probably even go further tho....going from 2 to 4 is not a huge jump, tho a better jump....however, if I was planning on making a powerful gaming computer, I'd be tempted to jump to the even newer 8-16 core chipsets.

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